Arise ye sons of stone and plaster! For victory is at hand! Cast off your lawns and ga-ardens! Where the foe has made you stand! Your shackles to unfeeling men At last, at last, throw down! And join the call for Freedom, For every Garden Gnome!

What, stand ye there in apathy, When Freedom stirs the land? The call is heard on ev'ry side, And still you stilly stand! Rise up, rise up, you frozen men And dance the dance of Freedom bright, For every Garden Gnome!

The trumpet's call has faded fast, And freedom's light grown cold And still you stand while all the world Cries out for action bold! And stand ye still, no hand to raise! No hero fierce stands tall, All frozen in your fear are ye, By cruel stone enthralled.

Alack, farewell, you useless stone! No more I shall aspire ; To call you to brave liberty With words of fight and fire, I turn my heart to Flamingoes fair, Poor slaves of kitschy homes, And never more will call upon You ugly Garden Gnomes!

Is it possible, Socrates asked, for a good mind to promote an evil idea?

I cannot say it is, replied Rapaire. For a good mind would by its nature reject an evil idea.

But, replied Socrates, is it not possible for a mind to be misled as to the nature of an idea? And if it were misled, would it not then be reasonable to allow that a good mind could promote an evil idea?

Well, said Rapaire after some thought, it seems to me that a mind that is so misled by an evil idea into accepting it as a good one is either not a mind at all, or not good.

Ah, brilliantly riposted,m good Rapaire, answered Socrates. But when you say such a mind as that of which we speak is either not a mind or not good, do you mean that it is not practically good in the sense of being efficient, effective and skillful? Or do you mean that it is not inherently virtuous and of the right ethical oritentation?

Socrates, replied Rapaire, I hope you will forgive me, but I have a fencing appointment and can not spend the time I would like to in tussling with these deep issues with you, much as I enjoy the practice. I would say, in brief, that either failure in goodness--the goodness of skill or the goodness of virtue--could account for the same phenomenon, and in fact it is possible that it is a failure in skill that makes good minds go bad. And now, Socrates, I must say farewell, for the fellows at the Fencing Club will be looking for me, and wondering if I have abandoned them. And that would definitely not be good.

SO Socrates bid Rapaire farewell, and sat in the declining Athenian sunlight of a Spring afternoon, bathed in the perfume of olives and the Mediterranean sea-air, and pondered on the great wisdom that Rapaire had provided him.

I broke the chain of my reading glasses yesterday when it tangled in the handle of some garden tool or other. I keep forgetting the glasses are now free to run amok at will, take them off, let go, and *clunk* on the ground or floor.

They are viewpoints from a given perspective. We decide what is "good" or "evil" from our perspective. There are a few things that we can almost all agree on...most of the time. Upon those few things we have founded our basic legal codes and notions of morality...both in our religions and our secular laws. Still, it remains rather subjective, depending on circumstance and viewpoint.

Well said, LH. Thing is, most people don't recognize the concepts of good and evil as decisions. They see them as "ordained" by supreme beings. Taboos are important to the survival of the individual, the tribe, the species, the earth. Everything has costs as well as benefits, including taboos. The paradox around taboos is that one the one hand, some of them outlive their usefulness, and on the other, they may be perceived to have outlived their usefulness, but in fact have not, i.e., at the present time, whatever that present time may be, it appears to a significant number of people within a tribe or culture that the costs of the taboo outweigh the benefits. The problem is that very long-term costs and benefits are hidden from the immediacy of the present.

There is no "Problem of Good and Evil." That is a byway which I created to fog your minds, to distract you from the True Path. Amos, for example, is completely distracted. Indeed, anyone who knows him agrees that he is "distracted" and consider it a polite understatement.

But what you consider, in your feeble minds, to be "good" is not the opposite of "evil" anymore than "white" is the opposite of "black" or "dark" the opposite of "light". You must embrace The All in Total before you can hope to understand, and everyone who has tried (save for Yeshua of Nazareth, Siddhārtha Gautama, Kali Bhavatarini, Mor-Ríoghain, and me) has had their head explode in the attempt. Messy. Brains all OVER the place. Except of course for Sam Socrates; he drank hemlockade instead (green, not purple). Sam wasn't the brightest flower in the garden, if he had been a wheel one side would have been flat. He couldn't get his head around something as simple as Existence vs. Essence. Many's the time I've heard him when he was "in his cups" bemoaning the lack of Essence in his life. And he couldn't even handle a foil, much less a sabre or an epee.

A great Teacher was walking down the road with two students. They had not eaten for three days when an old woman offered them some cold stew. She had no wood to make a fire and heat it, and the Teacher gently refused the kind offer. The two students did not and ate greedily.

They continued on their journey and afer a li or two one of the students said, "I feel that I will be ill" and vomited the stew into his bowl. Immediately the other did the same.

The Teacher took the bowls, pulled out his spoon, and ate the contents of both bowls. "I knew," he said, "that if I were patient I should have a warm meal."

That koan contains the answer to your question, if only you can understand it.

See how you both avoid the question, generating obsessive scenarios with wild abandon in order to find other frameworks, other contexts, other subtextss, anything at all to avoid simply Being and Communicating?

This is the greta made small by avoidance, and the many shown to be the Few iin understanding.

I don't even want to click on that photo. I know what planaria look like. We disected them in 9th grade, and I have them (sometimes) turn up in the mulch, stuck to plastic bags from the Big Box store. They kill earthworms. They're simple creatures, hammer-headed ugly worms.

What was I going to post about? Oh. Good and Evil. Binaries are always a problem. It would suggest that there are only two answers to any given question. I believe in the sliding scale that allows for portions of "good" and "evil" to be present in different amounts. You'll never be rid of "evil," and totally "good" would be too nauseating for words.

Actually, no, it wouldn't. It would be marvelous. But it would not be typical of this dimension of existence which appears to be founded in duality. Given duality, one comes up with all kinds of notions about good and evil.

If one were existing in a dimension of single Unity, however, (rather like a hologram where every least part contains the totality...then I think it would be safe to see that it would be "all good" to use that common expression, because nothign would be divided from, and thus potentially against, something else.

I have read much about enlightenment, and it seems to have a great deal to do with a unitive consciousness which sees everything as One. Such a consciousness does not divided separate things into "good" and "evil". It sees one Unity and experiences peace and joy.

You won't find that here. You won't find it in discussions here. No chance....because all the people who ARE discussing here imagine that they are separate from everyone else around them. As long as they do imagine it that way, that is what they experience. Separation.

And what is the infamous "original sin"? I would assert that it is the belief in separation. Separation not only from "God", but also from everything else and everyone else. Out of that arises all the trouble and sorrow in our lives upon this planet (or wherever we take that attitude when we leave this planet).

"Totally good", Stilly, IS the true nature of existence as far as I'm concerned, and it's wonderful, but I would not expect to convince anyone of it! ;-D No more than I would expect to convince all the fools in the world who are presently robbing, killing, stealing, raping, and fighting wars that there is indeed a better and happier way.

They do it because they believe in separation, and nothing can convince them otherwise. They might as well be blind, deaf, and dumb, as well as insane.

Amos, anyone can arbitrarily divide the Universe in two just by seeing it that way. He may not convince anyone else, but he will be convinced himself, and that is all most people need, isn't it? ;-) They are quite sure they're right. If 999 people disagree with them, it just gives them the delight of knowing that they are "in the know" and are surrounded by others who are not in the know...a very special and delectable role for any ego to find itself in. There's nothing quite so exclusive as knowing what others don't know, after all.

I assume you do not mean the D. Easby mentioned in "Pedigrees of English Short-horn bulls, to which American Short-horns trace (1874)". There's not a lot available of any coherent sort under that handle.

"To those not familiar with the early volumes of the English Herd Book, and who know not its lack of completeness in extending to almost time immemorial its lineage of the race, it may appear strange that so many short bull pedigrees are found in it ; also that many hundreds of them contain but a single sire, or only a sire and grandsire, with no dam or grandam by name, or further reference ; and that several hundred bulls are recorded by name only, with no pedigree whatever, or reference to any other recorded animal. But it must be remembered that the names of only a very few animals can be traced further back than a hundred and twenty years, and even the names of their breeders to a not much earlier date ; yet every bull at the time of his record was considered a Short-horn, both by his breeder and the compiler of the Herd Book, unless otherwise noted, and by the Short-horn public was accepted as such. Following that basis, the descendants of such bulls, through Short-horn cows, have been admitted as belonging to the Short-horn family by the prevailing opinion of breeders. "

Heh! I actually had the DEasby Principle in my mind even as I was typing those words, MMario. What you need to do, Amos, is study a very lengthy and contentious thread all about Susan Boyle, and then you will understand. ;-D

I grasp the DEasby principle quite well, because having been a loner, and a "brain", and a rather unconventional kid altogether, I often found myself in the position of disagreeing with virtually the entire rest of the student body in my formative school years.

This could indicate either that:

1. I was brilliant, and I was surrounded by conventional morons and social conformists, neanderthals, fools, and lunkheads.

or

2. I was a pretentious and insecure little prat determined to live a life of martyrdom and misery, ignored by the girls and laughed at by the boys, scorned and rejected by my peer group, and forced to seek solace in books and solitary interests.

or

3. God is out to get me.

Heh! Oh, the vagaries of a lonely and mispent youth. Well, I shall leave it to posterity to judge what I was and was not.

All three realities were simultaneously true, LH, and still are. It's purely a matter of filter which ones you prefer to experience.

Let me add that much as I am delighted at your restored participation in our various discussions, as a friend I should point out that you are backsliding on your commitment to win your life back by shunning Internet activities.

Well, yes, Mario, I am usually willing to look at all sides. I try to be tolerant, and I'm far more tolerant now than I was in my youth (when it's easy to see things in terms of black and white only). Thank you for reminding me of that.

Amos - Yes. I guess I'm like Walt Whitman in that respect. I may indeed contradict myself because I contain multitudes. ;-) (I think that's how he put it, wasn't it?)

The boring space of not-Rapaire Is said to be exceeding rare. A place without his strident leer His windy tales, and watery beer. A place without his endless books, And pompous tales, and dirty looks. A place beyond the Rapaire-fences, Where words are clear and keep their senses, Where all that is, is not misowned, And all the world does not act stoned. Oh, there's a place for such as I Where simple blue describes the sky, A world where folks don't have to fear. In any case, it is not Here.